Between Halmer End and Silverdale: Recollections, 1922-1939

Sarah Ward

Sarah Ward was born in Halmer End in 1916, moved to
Silverdale at the age of 18 months and has lived there ever since. The
recollections in this article cover the period from her stay with her
grandparents in Halmer End in about 1922 to her marriage in 1939.

Her account is full of items of historical interest.
For example, the material about her grandparents describes family relationships
from the early 1920s, but the grandparents themselves were born in the
mid-nineteenth century, so we have a glimpse, as through a glass, darkly, of how
their characters were formed at that time. It is important that the
memories of older people are recorded, or we will lose even that faint echo of
distant days. Even the detail of both her grandmothers marrying twice is a
reminder that broken families were common then as they are now, though usually
then by death rather than divorce.

The information was gained through a series of interviews and
supplementary letters that she provided in the first half of 1997. The
interviews were written up as question-and-answer, and so the text of this
article has been selected from the original 64 pages and pieced together around
themes. Her actual words have not been changed, though.
Phrases in italics have been put in by the editor to link the extracts together
and are not Sarah Ward’s; they often indicate what the question was. Sarah Ward
has been a keen and active participant, reading over the transcripts, correcting
them and adding information. She has scrutinized this article to check
that I have not distorted her words in the editing process.

Grandmother Jones

Grandma Jones lived at Halmer End. All me father’s
family lived at Halmer End and me mother’s family lived at Basford. I
always remember me Grandfather Jones as being ill. I think he must have
had cancer or something, but they used to call it wasting disease in them days.
I remember as a child going back to Halmerend while me mother looked after him,
and going Halmerend school and that.

Me Grandmother Jones was a martinet. She was only about
5 foot nothing and she was the boss. You didn’t dare go in the house if
she was cleaning up. You’d got to go out hail rain or sunshine till she
finished her morning’s jobs. You had stop outside. If anybody called
while she was doing her work, she’d say, “Have you done your bloody work yet?
If you haven’t, bugger off and get it done while I do mine.” Cause I don’t
swear, I’m just repeating what she used to say. And at night time,
if anybody was there and she wanted to go to bed, she’d sit there twiddling her
thumbs and she’d say, “I’m at wom, I wish every other bugger was.”
Cause she was a real card. But me Grandmother Johnson (from Basford),
she was a quite ladylike. She could swear when she wanted to but she was
different altogether. I mean, me mother was a ladylike person as well, you
know, she was always genteel. She never used to swear. And me
father, although he worked in the pit, you never heard him swear at home either.
Whether he did when he was at work I don’t know, but he never did when he was at
home.

My grandparents on my father’s side, the Joneses,
were a different class of people altogether. Me father went to work in the
pit when he was about 10, I believe. Course he wasn’t very well
educated and me mother had to teach him to read after they got married. So
that was the difference, cause me mother’s mother’s people originated from
Biddulph Moor, really, and they were sort of market gardeners.

All the family went to live at Halmer End while my
grandfather was ill, but we didn’t leave the
house, we didn’t give the house up in Silverdale. He’d got daughters and
granddaughters of his own living at Halmer End that he didn’t want to look after
him. He preferred me mother to look after him cause they had to wash him
and he didn’t want his own daughters messing around him he said. All Father’s
sisters married miners and the boys all married into mining families
except Father. I often wondered whether this was the reason he always
seemed the odd one out.

I got chased with the mop more than once. She
would be mopping the floor and you’d get chased with the mop. She used to
soap-stone the table in the living room every day and the toilet, of course, was
a wooden seat with the old duckets. She used to soap-stone them every day.
You didn’t dare go use that till it dried off and if she saw us going in she’d
chase you with the mop, “Come out that bloody petty, I’ve just cleaned it.”
Oh dear. We had some good times there.

She’d got a softer side to her. It was just that
I don’t think she could stand the children really. I think she’d gone past
looking after children. Cause I think she was a bit older than me grandad
actually. But she didn’t die till a few years after his death, which
was about 1922.

Nearly every other house in Halmer End was relation to us.
So when we went to Halmer End it was a matter of going from door to door and we
very often went, you know. It was a day out when we did go. You
didn’t dare go in one house without going in the others. “You’ve bin see
our so-and-so and you didn’t come see me”, and all that sort of thing.
When me mother and father went to visit, they always used to take us with
‘em.

Life in the mining community was free and easy for us as
children. Any rules, if there was any, were unspoken. Whatever
we were taught was by example, we copied our parents. For instance,
no one in my father’s family, not even the ones that were already grandparents
themselves, would have dreamed of disobeying my grandmother and we
respected our parents in the same way. But life for adults was
hard. Grandmother, although in her seventies, would insist on scrubbing
the table with bathbrick, a kind of pumice stone, getting down on her hands and
knees to clean the floor everyday, which no-one dared to walk on until it was
dry. After that it was open house for anyone. Washing day was a
nightmare with no washing aids. The boiler would be lit about 4 am,
washing started about 6 am until midnight. It was done by hand or scrubbed
on the kitchen table. Sheets, blankets etc were put in the tin bath that
most people had hanging outside and the miners bathed in in front of the fire -
there was no pit baths then. The sheets were then trodden like grapes. Having no
mangle, it took two people to wring, one at each end twisting in opposite
directions.

Polite so-called etiquette was nil. If you were offered
a meal it would most likely be served straight from the oven onto the bare table
on the enamel plate it was cooked on. Tea would be offered in thick earthenware
or enamel mugs. Grandmother’s teapot was only emptied once a week - it was
left on the hob to stew. The leaves would be dried and mixed with tobacco
to make it go farther. Tobacco was sold in loose strips, then called twists.
Smokers had to cut and shred it themselves. The pipes were pitcher and the stems
regularly snapped so we would give them bowls a good washing out and use
them to blow bubbles.

Bumps and bruises were treated matter of factly, no kisses
and cuddles “to make it better” but that didn’t matter because I always
felt safe and wanted, the reason being, I suppose, because if one had a real
problem they would stop whatever they were doing and just listen. Even
Grandfather, as ill as he was, would hold my hand, and listen. His
favourite remark was, “Don’t worry lass, it will be all right”

Relationships with parents

Mother didn’t show a lot of
affection, but she was an easy person to talk to and me dad was as well,
but if you were doing something that me mother didn’t like... Like when I
was in me teens, if you used make-up in them days you were a tart and she didn’t
like me using it, of course, but me father, he ought to have been a
diplomat, because he used to stand there and he’d say, “Leave her alone.
There’ll come a time when she’s got to use it to cover up the mistakes she’s
made.” So of course, I didn’t use make-up. Same as I say, he ought
to have been a diplomat.

My parents expected us to behave towards them
with respect and we were expected to do what we were told when we were told.
If we answered ‘em back... We never got smacked, but we had a dirty look.
Me father’d be looking at his newspaper and me mother would say, “Talk to
these kids,” and he’d only just have to raise one eyebrow. He’d got a
trick of raising one eyebrow over the top of his paper and we’d shut up as
though we’d had a darn good hiding. He only ever hit me eldest brother
once, me father did, and that was for something really bad he’d done, and then
went upstairs and cried himself, me father did. He really didn’t
believe in that. Mother never hit us either. But we got punished in
other ways. Sometimes we would have prefered a smack.

My parents had an uncanny knack of stopping me from doing
things they didn’t approve of by agreeing with me. For instance, all
teenagers try to see how far they can go. I was no exception, so one day at a
party I accepted a cigarette. Having lit it, one of the elder guests
turned to mother and said, “Are you going to let her smoke at her age?”
Mothers reply: “If she doesn’t smoke in front of my face, she’ll smoke behind my
back if she wants to.” So, of course, my act of bravado fell flat
and I never smoked again.

There was no bed time, not
really, but I think we were all sort of brought up that bedtime was bedtime and
you sort of got tired at the same time every night and you went to bed when you
felt like it, but there was no hard and fast rule about going to bed. I
think we just naturally assumed that we would go to bed at a certain time.

Food and clothes

Clothes were mostly new.
We did have some second-hand ones - they were hand me downs from relatives - but
they were mostly new. But they were bought on a card that me mother used
to collect on at the Co-op. Used to have a dividend card , or whatever
they used to call it, and she used to pay so much a week. If you wanted
anything during the sales and that, that was when we used to get our new
clothes.

Shoes were very difficult. There was one thing she
would not let us have, was second-hand shoes, because she had terrible feet from
wearing hand me down shoes, and she didn’t want us to suffer the same. If
she went without herself, we had new shoes. And the only time I ever saw
me mother cry was because she couldn’t afford new shoes. When the strike
was on and they provided all miners’ children with clogs at school, I went home
highly delighted with these clogs, sparking along the road, you know, on the
footpath, and as soon as she saw me she started crying. She says, “It’s a
bit of a beggar when we’ve got come down to this.” But I was highly delighted
with the clogs.

More often than not father only worked two days.
There was no dole then, the rent would have to be paid or you got turned out.
It took a lot of ingenuity to feed and clothe a family; lucky for us my
mother had plenty. Instead of sitting down to moan she did things that
some mothers didn’t seem to know how.

Once or twice a year she would hear that one of the farmers
(there were 5 within walking distance) would be killing an animal, which they
were allowed to do then. She would go and barter for a pig’s head to make
into brawn which would last for days, trotters, chitlings and hodge which the
farmer would have thrown away, cows heels, heart, and tongue. Tongue in
the shops, then as now, was a delicacy and would cost 3d or 4d a quarter pound.
She would get a whole one for sixpence, boil, skin and press it. This also
would last for days; nothing was wasted. Everything was initially boiled
and the stock used for split pea, onion or lentil soups. Main meals
not starters.

We had a slaughter house in the village and used to help to
drive the animals to it from the station, but Mother never bought anything from
there, she would have had to pay butchers’ prices. In between times it was
a pennyworth of bacon bones from the grocer or a marrow bone from the butcher
that was the base of our soup. A couple of times we had pigeon pie,
pigeons donated by an old neighbour in exchange for Mother making him one.
Father cleaned and dressed them.

We would hear that a farmer was making butter. We would
grab anything that would hold a quart and get a quart of buttermilk for a penny
ha’penny. Our main meal that day would be mashed potatoes and buttermilk.

The only thing that Mother didn’t make was savoury ducks.
These were made by butcher Basford’s wife, usually on a Wednesday. We would dash
home from school grab a basin and a penny and stand in a queue. She would
not serve adults and only one per child, so everyone had to fetch their own.
Sometimes we were lucky, sometimes not.

The dry crust was not a fallacy; it happened often. We
never saw butter or marg till later - our main source of fat was dripping or
suet. Mother never bought packet suet, always a great lump from the butchers for
a few pence and grate it herself. When we had steamed or boiled suet
puddings they were for a main meal, not afters. It was usually sailors’
doughballs on top of soup. She even saved on salt. Instead of buying a
3”x3”x9” block from the grocer for a penny, she would buy a 9”x9”x18” block for
3d off a man who came round with a handcart. We children spent ages making
sculptures out of it while grinding it down to put in jars.

Milk was not processed and delivered in bottles automatically
as it has been for years, but brought straight from the farms in churns, on
specially made handcarts. Only the people that could afford it would come
out as the milkman rang his bell.

Occasionally we would hear that one of the bakers (there were
4 on the village) was making vanilla slices. We would go round for a pennyworth
of vanilla bits, which the baker would cut off the ends. One baker would always
include a bag full of stale or mis-shapen buns. Some children would
eat them on the way home, but if we were lucky we always took them home, where
Mother would steam them to soften them and serve with watered down jam and thus
making a sweet for all of us. The only jams that she made at that
time were
blackberry & apple, blackberries picked by all of us as there was an abundance
round the village, and windfall apples from one of the local farms; and rhubarb
and ginger. Rhubarb she grew in a bucket before we had a garden.

My favourite sweet at this time only cost a couple of
spoonfuls of sugar. It was beastings custard, something else the farmer
would have thrown away, but when cooked properly would taste better than the
most expensive baked egg custard today. The only disappointment was we couldn’t
get the beastings often enough. Beastings is the milk from a cow that has just
calved. I never did find out why it was never mixed with regular milk, why
on a mixed farm it was fed to the pigs; on a dairy farm it was discarded.
I did ask the farmer I worked for but all the answer I got was a shrug of the
shoulders.

As regards proper cooking, I think it must have been the
temperature. Mother would beat sugar and beastings into an overproof dish,
and put her hand in the oven - there was no thermostats then.
Sometimes she would put the dish in straight away, others she would wait awhile.
Without any setting agent of any kind, at the right temperature it would set
like blancmange, but taste a lot nicer. Once I think she must have got it
too hot as it curdled. Not to be outdone she poured it into a muslim,
drained it overnight, and next day we had a kind of sweet cheese on our
bread.

I can’t imagine the children of today eating half the things
we did, even if they knew what they were, or in some cases especially if they
knew!

Comparing then and now, some of the parents today, if a child
calls for his/her playmate and the family are eating, they are told to go away
and come back later. When I was small, every child up to 6 or 7 years of
age could walk into their playmate’s house as if it was their own; after that we
had to knock, but were never refused entry. If the family were eating we
would be given a small piece of whatever it was, no matter how poor they were.

If any mother had a windfall of food from whatever
source - poached, given to them or a bargain-buy, like mother with her pigs
head, 4 or 5 extra small mouths would be fed.

Medicine

I can’t think of Mother making any medicines. I
think the main medicine we used to use was goose oil, if we had a sore throat or
a bad chest... She used to buy a goose every Christmas and save the fat off it
and that was your chest rub all through the year till the next year. Then
you got a fresh goose and the old grease was thrown away. If you’d got a
cough you took olive oil with a bit of what they called raspberry vinegar from
the chemist’s and you’d have your chest rubbed or your throat rubbed with
it and that was the only medicine we used to have, was this goose oil.

We never seemed to have many ailments except tonsilitis. But
our grandmothers’ remedies were completely different Grandmother Johnson’s
were supposed to be preventative. It was a ritual every Friday when I
stayed there to have either a spoonful of liquorice powder to clear the bowels,
or brimstone and treacle to clear the blood.

At Grandmother Jones’s if someone sneezed or shivered with a
cold they were given at least a pint of ice cold water to drink, then tucked
into bed with the hot ovenshelf. This was a solid plate of iron, not the
racks of today. She had 4 leeches in a jar which she used for boils
abcesses, and carbuncles which seemed rife at that time. Once when I cut
my hand I was trying to stop the bleeding, but when she saw that it was only a
flesh wound she knocked my good hand away saying, “Let it bleed, it will do more
good.” Then after a while, when the bleeding abated a bit, she took me
into the outhouse and wrapped my hand round and round in a cobweb to seal the
wound, so she said. Funnily enough, it didn’t need any more treatment. She
didn’t believe in bandages or fancy ointments.

Childhood leisure

We used to go on outings with the church. We’d p’raps
go down to Trentham and have a tea in Trentham Hall, something like that, you
know, but that would be the Sunday school trip. And then as we got older
it was Rhyl, p’raps, occasionally. But when we were younger it used to be
sort of
a picnic up the fields with games and that, but apart from visiting
relatives, we never went on trips.

As for games, we used to play
kick can. Used to kick a can. One of ‘em used to kick a can and
everybody used to run and hide while one of ‘em ran and fetched the can and then
he’d got to find where everybody else had hidden themselves when he got back
with the can. And bodger, used to play bodger. That was one person
bending down by a building with their hands on the building, then another
child’d go and jump on his back and then hold onto his back and then the next
one’d got to jump over that one and onto the first one. And then we used
to play skipping, hopscotch, top and whip, and if we’d got nothing else to do
we’d go and tie two people’s doors together and knock and run off. We used
to get cardboard and pitch it to see who could pitch it the farthest. And
that was how I come to break the Salvation Army Citadel window. Can’t
remember any others we used to play. Oh, we used to have boxing gloves on
and we’d have a little scrap in the street. Me mother put a stop to that
because I knocked one boy out once, so she put a stop to that. And we
played football and cricket cause I was one for boys’games. I wasn’t one
for dolls and prams. I was the only girl in the family, but I was a
tomboy, which was probably reasonable when you come to think you’re brought up
with three brothers.

I was always knitting and sewing. Me dad taught me to
knit and sew before I ever went to school. He taught me to knit on what he
called Lucifers. They were longer match sticks than the ones we get today
and he taught me how to knit on these match sticks. Me father spent a lot
of time with me anyway. He used to take me for walks and show me the
animals and the birds and the trees and the flowers and we used to walk for
miles, miles. Of course, at that particular time, Silverdale was
more-or-less country, so no matter where you went out of the village you were in
the country. We’d go up to Keele and Whitmore. Sometimes we went as
far as Stableford.

I didn’t have a bike till I was in me teens, then everywhere
I went I went on me bike. I biked to Rhyl once, but most of the time
it’d be round about Congleton or Tunstall or Burslem. I worked at Burslem
and I used to go on me bike every day to Burslem and back. Well how far is
Congleton? 10 or 12 miles is it? Buglawton and all round there.
We used to be a gang of us. We went to Alton Towers once and when we got
there, none of us had got enough money go in.

When I was ‘bout 18 or 19, ten
of us went camping at Rhyl. That was the only holidays we ever had in the
teens. One of the girls worked on a potbank and it was organised by
somebody on the potbank and I was asked to join - not my potbank, the one as I
worked
at - I was asked to make the number up. We just went round the
town, sat on the beach. We had a storm that week while we were there.
We sat on the beach wrapped up in blankets, just watching the waves
come over the sea walls. We just messed about, really.

School

I went to Halmerend school while me mother was looking after
me grandfather. I hated it there. There was one teacher that just
didn’t like me at all and everything that happened was my fault. If I was
anywhere near about it was my fault but, looking in retrospect, I think it was
because I could do the handcrafts better than she could. Cause when she
was teaching the children how to do knitting, and platting and darning and that
sort of stuff, I was sitting there with me elbows in me hands, you know, elbow
on the desk. “Get on with your work, Jones.” “I’ve done it Miss.”
“You can’t have.” Cause I was knitting socks for me brothers when I was 6
and while she was telling the other girls how to in, over, through, off
sort of thing, I’d got my piece of knitting done and sitting there with me chin
in me hand.

And one day she went a bit too far. It was
raining and we couldn’t play outside and the boys were running round the
cloakroom and things they do, and they paddled all over the wash hand basins and
one of them came away from the wall, and because I was washing my hands on that
basin when she came to call us into school, I had me legs slapped, cause they
used to slap your legs in them days, not give you the cane, the little ones
anyway. And when I got home, cause I’d still got the weals on me
legs and me mother wanted to know what it was for, and next day when we went
down to school, the teacher’d got a black eye. So me mother had gone down and
belted her one. She says, “So next time find out...” Cause she
says to me, “Are you sure you didn’t do it?” And I said “Yeah, I didn’t do
it.” I told her who did, so she went down, belted the teacher one.
Although me mother wasn’t a person as lost her temper, really, but she did lose
her temper that time.

Later, I used to enjoy school,
actually. Some teachers we liked, some we didn’t like.
Most of them were OK, but they were very very strict. They were all
spinsters and they were very strict and you got the cane at the drop of a hat,
or if you did anything very serious you went to the headmistress, for her to
give you the cane. But, all in all, I got on all right with all of em.
I did anyway. Some of the girls played up and got punished. I don’t
suppose I was an angel by any sense of imagination, but I didn’t seem to have
the cane as often as some of the others.

We never had the cane in the infants , but in the juniors you
had the cane if you... We were always lined up in the hall for morning prayers
and if you were late for morning prayers you had the cane. If you
went with dirty shoes, or your socks half mast, you had the cane. You had
to show your hands like that. If your nails and your hands were dirty you
would have the cane. I think we only had the odd girl that used to
have the cane for using her cheek. Whether the cane was the deterrent or
not, but all the teachers were treated with respect and we did as we were told.
But they were very strict on cleanliness and punctuality. That was my biggest
misdemeanour, was being unpunctual. I used to be running to school at five
to nine. Just dodge in through the doors before prayers started, more
often than not.

We used to have to write things down and you used to have to
learn things by heart, but when we first went across the infants, it was chalk
and slate, which, of course, got rubbed out when you’d written it down, so more
often than not what you’d learnt on that disappeared when you rubbed it out.
But it wasn’t until oh I was about 10 or 11 that we started using pens and books
that you could take home with you and learn - we never did any homework or
anything like that.

Work

Apparently, according to the last teacher that I had, I was
one of the brightest in the class and they wanted to put me forward to go to one
of the other schools (Orme Girls), but in those days you had to pay to
sit your exam and my mother couldn’t afford to pay, so of course, I couldn’t go
to any of the extra classes, any of the higher classes, so that was it. I
had to finish at 14. I wanted to go as a dressmaker’s apprenticeship, but
in those days you had to pay for your apprenticeship and me mother couldn’t
afford to do that (either), so that was that. I had to go and work in a
shop.

It was in Bridge St, Newcastle. Hubankses. I started by
selling nuts. In those days you seemed to have every kind under the sun,
great big piles, and they were all sold in their shells, not like they are
today. And I went from there to the fish stall, and then on the game
stall, like pheasants and ducks and rabbits. I skinned 500 rabbits in one
day. At 14 years old, yes, and because I’d done that, the boss give me an
extra half crown. But I didn’t work there long because where I was
standing in the shop. The others were behind the counter and they’d got
duckboards. It was a concrete floor and they’d got duckboards to walk on,
whereas I was standing afront of my counter, on the bare floor, and working
hours in them days were 8 o’clock to any time that you’d got a customer coming
in. I’d be going home at night sometimes when they were turning out the
pubs. I’d get home and, of course, the first thing, me feet would
go in a bowl of water and I’d go sleep eating me tea. So me father made me
finish. He says, “Er’s going ave rheumatic before she’s finished, before
she’s 20 with that job.”

Me next job was working on a farm and I worked there 4 years.
Still in Silverdale, Silverdale Road. Millbank Farm it’s called and I
worked there for 4 years. I didn’t actually work outside, I worked in the
house. Me job was mostly looking after the children and washing the milk
churns and all that. I didn’t actually work on the land, only during
the hay season and then you go and help with the hay, and then I went to work on
a potbank at Burslem. The pay on the farm was 5 shilling and me
keep. I had one afternoon off a week, and every other Sunday afternoon.
I gave the 5 shilling to me mother.

I came to work on the potbank because
a friend of mine worked there, so she told me they were employing so I went
there. And the wages there, when I started, was 18 shillings a week.
It was called Stephenson’s. It was right in the middle of Burslem
town, right by the town hall. The main produce was tiles and earthenware,
you know, tiles for the grates and I was a tile maker. I stayed there till
I got married, another 4 years.

I liked working on the farm but on the farm I was sort
of on me own, and on the potbank you’d got other friends, you worked in
company. It was a more monotonous job, cause it was repetition all the
time, on the machine, but it didn’t bother me. I enjoyed it.

I worked from 8 till 5 and
there were no holidays. I could have gone on working there after I got
married. Cause you see, when you said did me mother work, women weren’t
allowed to work in them days, but you could when I got married. Married
women on the potbank could’ve carried on working, but me husband didn’t want me
to.

I was sorry to leave, in a way, because I’ve always
been an independent person and I didn’t want to think that I was depending on
somebody else for my livelihoood. As daft as it seems, I still wanted to
be independent. But I wasn’t out of work long because the war started and
I started at Swinnerton.

That attitude wasn’t very common then. There could have bin others like me, but a lot of girls that
I associated with wanted to get married, to finish work. But having an
independent nature, you might say, I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody
else.

A wedding

I had known my husband for about 5 years when we got married.
We met through his sister. I was friends
with his sister. His family lived in Silverdale. They were working class.
His father was a painter and decorator, glazier. But I never met his
father because he died before I met him. I used to go school with his
sister, but of course we lost touch after we left school and then, about
17 or 18, I got in contact with her. We went out together and it was only
a platonic friendship with her brother until he decided he wanted to get
married. He asked me to marry him. So we were never really engaged
or anything like that.

We’d got nothing to save. I was only having 2 bob a
week pocket money and I was expected to get me own clothes out of that and by
that time his mother had become a widow, and although there were 7 children he
was the oldest one at home, so all his money had to go in keeping the household
going, till the other 3 started work, so he’d got none either. I think he
must have thought it was time he was looking after himself, as opposed to his
mother and 3 younger ones.

My wedding had to be postponed. We wanted it for the
first of January, but it had to be postponed because the parson’d got a boil on
the back of his neck. So we got married on the 7th. You just changed
the date and that was it. Course, I mean, your wedding today, everything’s
arranged 12 months in advance, but I did all the home cooking, I did all the
cooking for the wedding - sausage rolls, mince pies, whatever we had. I
did it all, the cakes and buns and all that, and we had it at home and it lasted
3 days. The ones as couldn’t actually attend the wedding come after the
wedding. We got married at St Lukes and we went back to me
mother’s for the reception and then we’d already got the house up Sneyd Terrace
before we got married, so we went up there. There was no honeymoon in them
days.

I made sausage rolls, pork
pies, fancy cakes, all kinds of things, and I made me own wedding cake and I
iced me wedding cake. I was still icing me cake - me mother was in a panic
- I was still icing me cake when I should have bin in church and she kept
saying, “You’re going to be late.” And I used to say, “It’s the bride’s
prerogative to be late.”

One of me husband’s workmates had got a car and this was, of
course, when cars were a luxury, not the whatsit as they are today. And he
says - and he was kidding him up at work - he says, “If you get married,”
he says, “I’ll take you to church in me car.” Cause he’d had a new
car. That was his overman at Kents Lane at the time. So he
took us to church in his new car.

Me mother’s parents came, all me aunties - cause I
mean they were big families in them days, you couldn’t cater for em all at once.
Lots of friends and relatives. People you worked with, there was quite a lot.
At the end of 3 days there was quite a lot.

By September 1939, Sarah Ward had started work at Swinnerton
munitions factory, where she had some interesting experiences. The
interviews go beyond that date, but limitations on space make 1939 a good place
to stop.